pacman -Syu breaks Pi running Arch

Question

So I just booted up my raspberry pi running Linux Arch. I read several posts that instructed my to update the system using pacman -Syu so I did so and then attempted to reboot my pi.

However it wouldn't restart (the green light blinks once then nothing). I reimaged the SD card and it works fine again until I run pacman -Syu.

I also tried pacman -Syu --ignore filesystem and then forced filesystem, with the same result.

The output is what I'd expect, it updates around 50 packages, a few are saved as .pacnews so I went and manually merged them according to the advice I found online, I tried several different possible ways on merging them as well, nothing seemed to work.

Does anyone have any ideas what would be causing this?

That `s` should be a capital. What is the output from the update command? — Jivings, Nov 19 '12 at 08:31
I would guess you are not merging the `.pacnew` files correctly. That could cause the system failures you describe. — Jivings, Nov 19 '12 at 19:52
@Jivings Do you know of somewhere where I can get some advice on how to merge them? I'm new to Arch — Daniel Gratzer, Nov 19 '12 at 20:01
@Jivings you were right, I was messing up merging some stuff, thank god for vimdiff. Post that as an answer and I'd be happy to accept it — Daniel Gratzer, Nov 20 '12 at 15:16
It would be interesting to plug a monitor and record the error messages displayed on the screen. — bortzmeyer, Nov 28 '12 at 21:12

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 20 '12 at 18:23

Unfortunately, when packages with config files are upgraded, the files can change. To deal with these files pacman appends them with the suffix .pacnew.

Merging of .pacnew files can be a tricky process. You can find more information about them on the Arch Wiki.

You can find your pacnew files with the following command:

find /etc -regextype posix-extended -regex ".+\.pacnew" 2> /dev/null

An easy way to merge the files is to use Yaourt if you have it. The following command will take you step by step through the process:

yaourt -C

tjoe · Answer 2 · 2012-11-19T18:48:25.790

I am also using the Arch Linux ARM image from the raspberrypi.org and I did update the packages with the pacman -Syu command a couple of times, just did it now, without any problem.

Do you try to update the packages just after reimaging the SD card ? Do you get an error message when running that command ?

You could try to skip the kernel and firmware packages by adding the following line in /etc/pacman.conf and see how it goes:

IgnorePkg   = linux-raspberrypi,linux-headers-raspberrypi,raspberrypi-firmware

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:56

0

The Pi being what it is (brittle), and an upgrade changing many files, it is quite possible that you actually ran into a problem with the SD card. See Filesystem corruption on the SD card for an example.

May be trying with another card? Or trying to underclock the Pi?

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:56

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answered Nov 28 '12 at 21:10

bortzmeyer

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pacman -Syu breaks Pi running Arch

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